Page 12 of The City in Glass

The angel looked around with a frown, taking in the pipeweed and jewelknot that grew up out of the ground around them. They were common plants and hardy. Though angels might sing a blessing for every blade of grass and every pebble, it was hard to imagine an angel patient enough to sing for weeds.

“This isn’t my work,” he said gruffly, and Vitrine shook her head.

“No, it wasn’t. This was spoiled before you came. You were too late for this one.”

“Who ruined it?”

“The woman who built it up and then set it on fire when she remembered what it was for. She did, eventually. My precious Chanda could not forget forever. If she had, what a wonder she might have made.”

“What did she grow here?”

In response, Vitrine knelt where the greenhouse workbench had been, where Chanda had used small matchsticks wrapped in scraps of wool to transfer pollen from one blossom to another, where she had slit the shells of long-dormant seeds to see if they might be encouraged to grow. She had been careful, so careful, but the most careful human in the world was never proof against the flick of a demon’s finger.

Vitrine sought through fifty years of neglect, picking through the clay and the rock and the wood ash until she found what she was looking for: a double-lobed seed that slumbered in a shell too thick to easily pierce. With one sharp thumbnail, she split the purplish-black skin to reveal the white flesh inside. It released a quick green odor, and encouraged, she set it in the ground, covering it with her hand.

Chanda’s name was written in her book, and so was what Chanda wanted to call this plant, before she remembered and broke every precious pane of glass and returned her success to the fire where it had come from. For Chanda, she could wait for a little while, some few months, perhaps even the full run of the year, to see if anything could be made of the seed she had dropped.

The angel did not move. Instead he paced the perimeter where the walls had fallen, bending down to pick up the fingers of the stone angel briefly before throwing them down again.

“What are you doing now?” he asked, and she shrugged.

“I am waiting.”

“For?”

“For something to change.”

She thought he might fly off then, too frustrated at her strangeness and the blasted barren quality of ground that had been three times scourged, but instead he knelt opposite her, placing his hand over hers. His hands were broad and squared, the nails pristine. They were entirely without lines or calluses, and she wondered for a moment what it would be like to cleave them joint from joint, cleaning them and separating the bones of his fingers. They would rattle like ivory dice on the broken pavers of Azril, or perhaps they would chime. She angrily jerked her eyes away to meet his.

“This isn’t yours,” she hissed, but he only shook his head.

“May the light forbid that it should be,” he retorted, and under her hand and his, something happened.

It was a twitch, so small that it barely budged more than a few grains of soil, and then another, and another. She looked down at his hand, and she would have pulled away if it were not for what she was protecting underneath.

Another day passed, another day after that, and she drew a quick breath as something came up to tickle her palm, first shyly, and then more insistently, and then he pulled away, standing up, his face impassive. She gave him a haughty look and waited another day to show him that she had no regard for what he did or did not do.

When she did lift her hand, it was to reveal a tender pale sprout coming from the earth, the two tiny leaves curling like the horns of a ram.

“Oh Chanda,” she said, full of the woman who had come from Johari with a half-dozen deaths on her head.

She watched, breath held, as a month passed, then another, and another. The plant was not meant to be a fast grower, but this one was, and she would have roared at the angel to quit with his tricks if her eyes hadn’t been full of this new life, the thick straight stalk, the frilled leaves that looked too pale to be healthy.

“She would have had it far earlier, if only she could have borne for it not to be beautiful,” Vitrine said without thinking, and the angel, who had never looked at the plant growing at all, frowned.

“Was it meant to be a beautiful plant?”

“A mother wants her child to have every advantage,” Vitrine said, and then she remembered Avaline Demorsico and the crane that would never be her. She shut her mouth and refused to open it for another four months.

They waited together in the ruins of the greenhouse, the angel as properly upstanding as the statue had been, Vitrine perched on the pedestal, her feet swinging above the earth. When the rains came, she stretched a fold of sailcloth over her head like a courtesan with a fringed veil. The angel was too proud to heed the rain. He let it soak his clothes and run off his body as if he were a building, a guardhouse or perhaps some fine municipal thing clad in marble and glass. She would have liked him better if he was, but instead he was an angel, and sometimes she amused herself by shying rocks at his feet, at the broken walls behind him.

Between them, Chanda’s plant ceased growing taller, but Vitrine could tell that it was still growing, the secret alchemy of its heart searching and waiting for what it needed to mature.

Come along, little one, Vitrine mouthed. Come out. The world is so wide and wonderful, and it cannot do without you.

On the third day after the rains stopped, when the sun shone like a new gold coin with the world for the buying, the first flowers appeared. They were tiny and crimson, the red of carmine rather than of blood, and they rolled out like tiny delicate tongues from a tight bud, spreading open to devour the world.

Vitrine touched the half-dozen flowers in wonder, and when she bent her head to kiss them, they trembled with some remembered fragment of Chanda’s love of dark things and a bit of her fatal despair as well.